Why Womsh won’t be having a Black Friday sale
We’ve entered the final countdown to an event that’s managed to barge its way into our consumer life: Black Friday. An all-American custom that’s gradually spread across the whole world, resulting in incredible peaks in sales for companies in every corner of the globe.
As a business, we’ve resolved to take a stance: we’re not on board with people being pressured into making a purchase based just on bargain pricing. Why do we think this?
Because sustainability is based on various principles, one of the key ones being consume less, consume better. A philosophy far removed from that of the for-a-limited-time-only “unbeatable deals” that apply to certain items, prompting us to purchase something that’s not exactly what we want, what we like or what we need, but hey, it’s on sale, and it’s on sale now. Promotional campaigns of this type encourage impulse buying, the bitter enemy of the conscious consumer.
Hence, for Black Friday, we’ve decided to do what we try to do every day: focus our efforts on making the planet a slightly better place for everyone.
We won’t be applying discounts to our collections, but we will be extending the Treedom initiative to all purchases made between Friday 29 November and Sunday 1 December. So what’s that exactly?
Usually, for every person purchasing a pair of vegan shoes, we plant a tree through Treedom, an Italian online platform promoting agroforestry projects across the world to offset CO2.
So, every purchase made over this period, from any of the collections, not just the vegan line, will get us to plant a cocoa tree in Treedom’s Womsh forest.
We’ve asked green blogger Daria Daria to give us a hand spreading this Black Friday idea. Who’s she? Her real name’s Madeleine Alizadeh: she’s a young Austrian activist, podcaster and writer. She’s created a sustainable fashion label called dariadéh, and through her channels, she aims to promote awareness of sustainability, slow fashion, and conscious consumption issues.
Worldwide, more and more brands are saying no to Black Friday, or donating a considerable chunk of their takings over the sale period to worthy causes. There are some great initiatives out there that put the ethical into shopping, we just need to look for them, be ready, not be content to just follow the herd.
The question that should always inform our purchases, not just on Black Friday, is: do I really need it?
The sense of urgency that certain limited-time offers convey can open our eyes to superfluous purchases: if we really needed it, we would’ve bought it already. We’ve survived this far without, chances are we can make it through tomorrow, too.
We’re not trying to be the trend-buckers for the sake of it, we want to encourage a slower mindset when it comes to consumption, a certain critical attitude towards brands you love, a healthy curiosity about manufacturing processes, the materials used, the living conditions of the people producing your shoes, your clothes.
Outside Italy, various initiatives have been launched under the #greenfriday umbrella, ranging from not buying anything to supporting small local businesses.